Series: Animal death before the fall

Part 2

Does God’s provision of plants for food disprove prelapsarian carnivory?

Continued from part 1, on the meaning of “very good”

Does Genesis not depict a vegetarian diet? Is this not what God’s words of provision in Genesis 1:29–30 indicate?

And God said, “Lo, I have given to you all herbage seeding seed that is upon the face of all the land, and every tree that in it is the fruit of a tree seeding seed; to you it is for eating. And to every living thing of the land, and to every flier of the heavens, and to every thing crawling upon the land that in it is the lifebreath of life, all green herbage for eating.” And it was so. Genesis 1:29–30

On the face of it, this certainly seems to imply that God gave only plants for food in the original creation. And is this not corroborated in his “re-provision” to Noah after the flood?

And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, “Be fruitful and abundant and fill the land, and your fear and your breaking be upon every living thing of the land, and every flier of the air, in everything that crawleth on the ground, and in every fish of the sea; into your hand they are given. Every crawler that is alive, for you it is for eating; as unto the green herbage, I have given to you everything; just flesh with its lifebreath, its blood, eat ye not.” Genesis 9:1–4

These verses are usually read to say that meat only came on the menu after the flood. But when we ask some careful questions, this impression starts to wane. I am going to work backwards from Genesis 9 to Genesis 1, for reasons which will become clear.

What is the comparison in Genesis 9?

God clearly compares the way he gave plants—which we read about in Genesis 1:29–30—with the way he is now giving animals. He tells Noah, “as unto the green herbage, I have given to you all.” The preposition is the same one that gives us the “k” in k’negdo (see the previous article); it is explicitly a term of comparison, though a little broader than “as” or “like;” hence my usual translation of “as unto.” Given standard YEC presuppositions, it is natural to read this comparison as a contrast between the general constituents of what is eaten, before and after:

But this vegetarian interpretation is not the only way to read the text—and you will notice that in my translation, which simply renders the Hebrew as closely as I can, rather than trying to explain it like most Bibles do, such a reading is not so obvious. We could just as easily understand the comparison in terms of a similarity between the extents of what is eaten, before and after:

Is the comparison one of contrast—plants versus animals—or one of similarity—all plants and all animals?

Both options are possible grammatically, but only the latter is possible contextually. To explain this, notice first the odd emphasis on “crawlers;” elsewhere also called “teemers.” These two terms are traditionally both translated “creeping things,” and refer broadly to rodents, reptiles, and insects.

It is they which God oddly emphasizes here in his provision of food. He specifically says, “Every crawler that is alive, for you it is for eating.” He does not say “every beast,” or “every living thing of the land,” though the latter do feature in the previous clause. He directs our attention to rodents, reptiles, and insects—which is especially odd since these are not natural dietary staples. Beef and lamb were the meat staples of Israel, and in the modern day we have added poultry and pork. But who eats crawlers?

To a Hebrew, the significance of this would be obvious, because Torah forbade the eating of only these particular critters in general:

And every teemer that teemeth upon the land is an abomination; eat it not. Everything going upon its underside, and everything going upon all fours, unto everything with abundant feet, to every teemer that teemeth upon the land, no eating ye them, in that an abomination are they. Abominate ye not your souls with any teemer that teemeth, and defile not yourselves with them, and ye be defiled with them, in that I am Yahweh your God; and hallow yourselves and be ye holy, in that holy am I; and defile not your souls with any teemer that crawleth upon the land. Leviticus 11:41–44

The neglected clean/unclean distinction

For those familiar with the ceremonial laws of Israel, God’s provision in Genesis 9 is very plainly a removal of the clean/unclean distinction—not a giving of meat for the first time. This has actually been plain since Genesis 7:2, where the clean/unclean distinction first appears:

And Yahweh said to Noah, “Come in, thou and all thy house, unto the ark, in that thee I have seen righteous before my face in this generation. From every clean beast take thou to thee seven, seven: the man and his woman; and from the beast that is not clean, it two: the man and his woman; also from the flier of the heavens seven, seven: male and female, to keep alive seed upon the face of all the land.” Genesis 7:1–3

Noting in passing the delightful use of “the man and his woman” for animals—apparently too whimsical for self-serious Bible translators—observe the fact that animals were clean or unclean in Noah’s day. This is a deathblow to prediluvian vegetarianism, because as we saw in Leviticus 11, cleanness is a dietary category (cf. Dt 14).

I get the impression that modern readers think cleanness must be related to sacrifice: that Noah took extra clean animals for liturgical use. This is not so. Where scripture talks about the clean/unclean distinction, it is not in terms of sacrifice, but in terms of what a covenantally holy people may eat. Conversely, where it gives guidelines for sacrifice, such as in Leviticus 1, it does not talk about the cleanness or uncleanness of animals; it simply presupposes the animal will be clean, because a sacrifice is a meal for God (Lev 3:11; Num 28:2), and of course you would not offer God unclean food! But sacrificial animals were only a tiny subset of the clean animals: Hebrews could eat fish or antelope or sparrows or locusts, but they certainly would not sacrifice them.

In other words, the rationale for his taking extra clean animals onto the ark was to feed his family. They couldn’t very well eat the animals that were needed to repopulate the earth!

We certainly cannot argue that it must only have been the wicked of Noah’s day who were eating animals, and this is why the clean/unclean distinction existed in his time. Those for whom “all flesh had corrupted its way on the earth” (Gen 6:11) certainly would not care about ritual cleanness! Doubtless the wicked were eating unclean animals as part of the corruption of their way—but equally doubtless, the righteous were eating clean ones, because the whole point of the clean/unclean distiction is to allow the eating of some animals.

This is the only explanation for why Noah took seven clean pairs onto the ark—and it obviously refutes the vegetarian reading of Genesis 9:1–4. God cannot be giving meat as food for the first time if people were eating meat already. Rather, the provision must be about which animals Noah could eat. God is giving the animals “as unto” the plants in the sense that Adam and Eve could eat all the plants, and now Noah can eat all the animals. Genesis 9:1–4 is the removal of the clean/unclean distinction. This links the initial provision and the second provision in a thematically satisfying way, while doing justice to the text. It is also a logical provision, since meat would be scarce after the flood.

The Genesis 9 provision is linked to man’s creation mandate

3P advocates assume that, since Noah is only given meat after the flood, it therefore certainly could not have been given prior to the fall. Meat-eating, then, must be a later accommodation to a fallen world.

But the presupposition runs backwards too. Once we see that in fact Noah was eating meat before the flood, the idea that carnivorism is an accommodation to the fall or a result of the curse is thrown into serious doubt. In fact, the implication is to the contrary, because Genesis 9 is a renewal of the creation mandate: to have dominion over the animals. This dominion is the reason given that the animals shall fear us, and we shall eat them. Observe—here is the original creation mandate:

And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and abundant and fill the land and subjugate it, and hold sway in the fish of the sea, and in the birds of the heavens, and in every living thing that crawleth upon the land.” And God said, “Lo, I have given to you all herbage seeding seed that is upon the face of all the land, and every tree that in it is the fruit of a tree seeding seed; to you it is for eating.” Genesis 1:28–29

And here is the restatement to Noah—notice how closely it echoes:

And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, “Be fruitful and abundant and fill the land, and your fear and your breaking be upon every living thing of the land, and every flier of the air, in everything that crawleth on the ground, and in every fish of the sea; into your hand they are given. Every crawler that is alive, for you it is for eating; as unto the green herbage, I have given to you everything.” Genesis 9:1–3

But if Genesis 9:1–3 is a restatement of Genesis 1:28–29, then scripture is not linking meat-eating to the fall, but to the creation mandate. But if eating meat is consistent with the creation mandate, then even if man did not eat meat prior to the fall, there’s no reason to think this was a permanent state of affairs. Adam and Eve were well looked after in the orchard—but if they had not fallen, and had instead ventured out to fulfill their mandate of ruling the world, their situation and needs would have changed.

What the clean/unclean distinction implies about the prelapsarian diet

We have seen that dietary cleanness is not Mosaic, but Adamic—it originates not in Moses, but existed even in Noah’s day.

Yet God has now made all foods clean in Christ.

What this tells us is that the clean/unclean distinction is a result of the fall of Adam and the curse on the ground. When the Second Adam took dominion of the world (Mt 28:18 etc), he repealed the cleanness laws, because in him the curse on the ground begins to be rolled back.

But notice the implication: Christ takes us back to a prelapsarian state. By redeeming the world, he takes us back to the world as it should have been. And in progressively glorifying the world, he is moving us toward that state which the original creation should eventually have reached under Adam.

This is not a vegetarian state. Christ did not come and take meat off the menu. He came and put more meat on the menu (Acts 10:13–15). By hallowing the world, he makes all foods hallowed. It therefore rubs against the grain of redemptive history to imagine a prelapsarian world in which no one ate meat.

Is everything not provided precluded?

If meat was not first given for food to Noah, and if Genesis 9’s restatement of the creation mandate suggests that it was on the menu from creation, then why does God give only plants for eating in Genesis 1?

And God said, “Lo, I have given to you all herbage seeding seed that is upon the face of all the land, and every tree that in it is the fruit of a tree seeding seed; to you it is for eating. And to every living thing of the land, and to every flier of the heavens, and to everything crawling upon the land that in it is the lifebreath of life, all green herbage for eating.” And it was so. Genesis 1:29–30

We must acknowledge that God’s words here straightforwardly describe a vegetarian diet. This seems difficult to harmonize with everything we have seen in scripture so far—but is it? I have noticed that 3P proponents take it as obvious that the provision precludes meat. They read it rather like the sign above the ants’ nest in The Once and Future King: ❋ T.H. White, The Once and Future King (Harper Voyager, 2014), 112.

The fortress was entered by tunnels in the rock, and, over the entrance to each tunnel, there was a notice which said:

EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY

Am I, like the Wart, reading the notice with dislike, though I do not understand its meaning? Is this a case where God’s provision of food should obviously be read something like, everything not provided is precluded? Let us see what happens if we push this assumption to its logical conclusions…

1. A stricter-than-vegan diet

If God’s words here preclude meat (because everything not provided is precluded), should they not also preclude eggs? What about milk, or cheese, or yoghurt, or honey? How about mushrooms—they are not green herbage seeding seed?

Certainly if everything not provided is precluded, then the creational diet did not include anything except what you can make from plants and trees. Meat was off the menu—but so were the two chief blessings by which the promised land was appellated, milk and honey, along with much else besides.

That this seems like a dumb interpretation should certainly give us pause. If the principle is obviously too general by which we inferred that meat was precluded from the creational diet, then maybe meat wasn’t precluded from the creational diet. If we can read God giving all the plants for food without thinking he was excluding milk and honey, then absent some other principle, we can certainly do so without thinking he was excluding meat either.

2. No food for fish

This is further reinforced when we realize that his provision does not even extend to marine life. God gives the greenery to “every living thing of the land, and to every flier of the heavens.” Did he give nothing to any of the creatures that teem in the waters beneath the earth? If we are consistent in our exclusionary principle, we have to admit that what the aquatic life would eat is at best left a mystery!

A theologically-focused provision

Like everything in the creation account, the way God describes the provision of food is not meant to be taken as exhaustive and without exceptions. Genesis 1 does not describe the creation of jewels or gold—but we discover in Genesis 2 that they are indeed there, in the land of Havilah. Neither does God tell us about making bacteria, or fungi, or most of the things that live in the seas; only fish and dragons (Hb. tanin; cf. Isa 27:1)—the latter of which most Christians are ironically uncomfortable about.

This is actually par for the course with scripture; we know that it often assumes exceptions without stating them, and that its descriptions are not meant to be analytical and exhaustive, but rather theological and specific. Indeed, one aspect of an event may be deliberately omitted to emphasize another, depending on the thematic intentions of the author, which is why there seem (to our modern minds) to be “discrepancies” between Genesis 1 and 2, or between events like the withering of the fig tree in Matthew 21:10–22 and Mark 11:11–26. We should therefore ask…

As it turns out, there are at least three such factors that are quite easy to discern in the text.

1. An orchard context

God is speaking to Adam and Eve, whom he created in a garden sanctuary, an orchard of fruit trees. I have lived on an apple and pear orchard, and while there were pheasants and sheep there, I can assure you that eating them would have been quite difficult if I had no tools or fire. Adam doesn’t even yet have clothes. ❋ I say “yet” because certainly he would have been issued them eventually. For an oblique explanation of this, see the section on probation and kingship below; but for a more direct explication, refer to our True Magic episode, “Would we be naked if not for sin?” (July 2023). https://www.truemagic.nz/p/s1e1-what-is-clothing-for. Thus, as God introduces the couple to their new home, it is natural for him to focus on the fruit.

Furthermore, when he emphasizes the universal provision, extending it to all the animals, he is doing so in the garden. “Every animal” that Adam and Eve would know about would be every animal God placed in the garden. To suppose that he placed lions and bears there begs the question in favor of a 3P world: it presupposes that predationism is false by assuming that lions and bears ate plants. But if lions and bears were made to be predators, God would not have placed them in the sanctuary of the orchard—and so his provision of plants for food would not extend to them. Reading this way seems awkward to us because we have been conditioned by the naive newspaper hermeneutic of most creationists, and are painfully unaccustomed to “high-context” literature which eschews our facts-based, journalistic assumptions about reporting, in favor of a meaning-directed, thematic of theological approach. But notice how such an interpretation meshes cleanly with God’s lack of a provision for sea creatures. Why does he not mention them? Not because he has not provided food for them. Rather, because he is speaking to Adam and Eve about every animal in the garden—and you don’t find sea creatures in gardens. But you don’t find predators in them either.

In short, God’s emphasis that the provision of food extends to all terrestrial creatures naturally reflects its context—yet we cannot take this to imply that other kinds of foods were not available beyond that context, any more than we should think milk and honey were excluded within it.

2. A contrast between provision and prohibition

There is a vital thematic element running directly through Genesis 2 and 3—chapters which, you may have noticed, come right after the provision of food in Genesis 1. Compare Genesis 1:29 to Genesis 2:16–17:

And Yahweh God commanded the man, saying, “From every tree of the garden thou eating eatest, and from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad thou eatest not from it; in that in the day thou eatest from it, thou shalt dying die.

This reiterates the provision of food in order to set up a contrast with the one thing Adam cannot eat. The gift is compared with the ban, so we can see how extremely small a thing it was for God to reserve one tree—one tree—out of the whole garden. “You can eat aaaaaall of these—just not this.”

Now since the prohibited item was a fruit, if he wished to establish a contrast between the provision and the prohibition, it would make thematic sense to couch the provision in terms of plants as well. Not only is it natural to speak this way, but it creates a rhetorical balance.

For example, if I were going out with my daughter and I didn’t want her to wear a particular dress, I might say, “You can wear any dress you want except the one with the stain on it.” Yet my reason for saying it in this way is not to imply that she cannot instead wear pants, but rather to naturally match what is allowed to what is disallowed. I am formulating how I state the provision by first considering what it is I wish to preclude.

If we take Genesis 1 and 2 as thematically linked—surely we should—and if a major theme that links them is provision versus prohibition—as you surely must agree given what happens in Genesis 3—then we have good reason to understand the provision this way: it is couched in vegetarian terms to emphasize the contrast with the tree of knowledge, rather than to imply that meat or mushrooms are off the menu.

Probation and kingship

Let me complete this study by returning us to the comparison of Genesis 1 and 9…through Daniel 1. Bear with me.

In Daniel 1:8ff, Daniel and his friends purpose not to be “sullied” by the king’s food. Rather than having the fancy morsels of the king, they instead ask, literally, for “seeded things,” zero’im, from the word zera, seed.

You may have noticed that seed features rather prominently in the provision of food in Genesis 1:29; and in fact, this prominence is introduced with the creation of plants, which are described with a strange repetitious emphasis on seed, zera—an emphasis so awkward that translators, out of embarrassment for God’s verbal stumblings, try to smooth it over, rather than preserving it on the assumption that he might have done it on purpose because it matters:

And God said, “Let the land sprout sproutings, herbage seeding seed, fruit tree making fruit unto its kind thats seed is in it, upon the land.” And it was so, and the land brought forth sprouts, herbage seeding seed unto its kind, and tree making fruit thats seed is in it unto its kind; and God saw that it was good. Genesis 1:11–12

Obviously God need not have written this way: herbage (edible plants) “seeding seed,” and fruit tree “making fruit thats seed is in it.” We know that plants produce seeds, and that fruits have seeds in them. But God calls our attention to these things with the repetition. Seed is a fundamental theme of scripture well before we even get to the fall.

Returning to Daniel, a second thing to note is that the king’s food is not just “food.” It is referred to as food and wine twice; and the word “drink” is used four times. Daniel does not merely ask for seeded things in contrast to the king’s food; he asks for water to drink in contrast to “the wine of his drink” (v 8).

Thirdly, he and his friends are described as yeledim (v 17). This literally means “boys,” and almost always refers to children—but they are surely young men. The incongruity is further emphasized as we continue to read, and immediately discover that God gives to these “boys” all “knowledge and mastery:” two words first used in scripture in Genesis 2 and 3 to describe the forbidden tree. It is the tree of knowledge (Gen 2:9); and this knowledge is mastery:

And the woman saw that good was the tree for eating, and that a delight it was to the eyes, and a desirable tree to make one masterful, and she took from its fruit, and ate; and she gave also to her man with her, and he ate. Genesis 3:6

The traditional translation is that the tree is desirable to make one “wise,” but this is not the usual word for wisdom, chakham—which is ubiquitous, for instance, in Proverbs from 1:2 and onwards. It is a rarer word, sakhal, which is translated much more diversely in most Bibles because it is used in a more diverse way, referring to what in English we might call “having a handle on things” (cf. Dt 29:9; Dt 32:29; Josh 1:7–8).

It is natural to read Daniel 1 and puzzle over what Daniel and his friends are thinking. Most assume that they do not want to be ritually defiled. But this is very implausible, for three reasons:

1. The word that is used in Daniel 1:8, where he purposes in his heart not to sully himself, is not tame, the word standardly used for ritual defilement; it is ga’al, a rare word used only in the prophetic literature. It doesn’t refer to being ceremonially unacceptable to God in a way that can be corrected by washing, but being unacceptable to him in oneself due to having broken his commandments (see especially Isa 59:3; Lam 4:14; Zeph 3:1; Mal 1:7, 12).
2. The diet they request is extraordinary—there is nothing in the Mosaic food laws to explain it. If they had been concerned about ritual defilement, they could have simply asked for a Torah-compliant diet; but Torah certainly did not require them to eat a vegetarian diet.
3. The text specifically mentions that he does not want to sully himself with the wine of the king. This is nonsensical if ritual defilement is the concern, because wine does not ritually defile.

Daniel’s concern is incomprehensible in terms of Torah observance—but it is fully comprehensible in terms of sacramental patterning. We need hardly do a study to know that the essence of the king’s food was meat; the provision of meat was central to a king’s feasting of his people. Nor do we need to spend time tracing out how scripture depicts wine as a kingly drink. ❋ I will give only the briefest summary below; for more, see the latter part of my sermon, “The sacrificial significance of bread and wine” (March 2023). https://redwoodchurch.substack.com/p/how-should-we-worship-part-10-the. It was the one thing priests could not partake of in the sacrfices at the temple, on pain of death (Lev 10:9; Ezek 44:21); poured out instead for God. This is because God’s people as a whole were as children, under a tutor, under the law, and “so long as the heir is a child, he differeth nothing from a servant” (Gal 4:1). Priests are servants, palace attendants in God’s earthly court, as the cherubs are in his heavenly one: they follow instructions. This is why they never sat down. But kings are rulers, seated on thrones; they go beyond instructions; they have developed wisdom to rightly apply the law in new ways. This is why God is so pleased with Solomon when he asks for wisdom to rule—because it is the one thing absolutely necessary to rule (Pr 8:15). It is also why immediately, the first case described is one that has no precedent in the Law to instruct him (1 Ki 3)—a king must have the mastery of the law to go beyond it.

This brings us back to wine, because wine, too, takes wisdom. Even if you follow the instructions when you make it, you are quite likely to end up with something much closer to vinegar. Many people make their own bread; few make their own wine, and fewer still want to drink it.

So wine is connected in these ways with kings and with judgment; hence Ahasuerus is always depicted in Esther as judging in connection with drinking wine. Which brings us finally back to Genesis 9—because this is where man is first given the right to exercise judicial, kingly judgment:

Your blood for your lifebreath I shall require; from the hand of every living thing I shall require it, and from the hand of adam, from the hand of a man’s brother I shall require it, the lifebreath of adam: whoso poureth out the blood of adam, by adam his blood shall be poured out, in that in the image of God made he adam. (Genesis 9:5–6)

Eliding for now the subtle significance of the distinction between ish, “man,” and adam, which I leave untranslated on account of not having another word in English, note for now that Noah is being given authority to prosecute capital crimes: to put people to death for murder. This is kingly authority. Cain is not put to death for murdering Abel; God in fact prevents it because it is not yet given to man to exercise this kind of authority.

Now what immediately preceded the giving of kingly authority to Noah? It was the giving of all animals for food. Endless meat, in the words of Scar’s hyenas—the first time meat is explicitly given in scripture. And what is the next thing Noah does after this? He plants a vineyard and makes wine—a kingly drink. This is the first time wine appears in scripture also. These are not coincidences.

Daniel’s sacramental logic fulfills (and explains) Genesis 1 and 9

Daniel and his friends know their scriptures much better than most of us do. In light of their knowledge, they recognized two things: firstly, they were not yet ready for the task the king desired of them, being his advisers. They would need to prepare themselves by seeking God before they could partake in the king’s judgments (cf. Jas 1:5). Secondly, they were not yet authorized for the task the king desired of them. They would need to prove themselves faithful to God before they could partake in the king’s judgments. They were Adams, and not yet Noahs. To accept the king’s food and wine would be akin to taking upon themselves kingly authority—which is the very thing Adam tried to do by taking from the tree of knowledge, rather than waiting on God to give it to him. He tried to “become Noah” on his own behalf, rather than God’s.

Indeed, since the king of Babylon is a serpent figure, being under a demonic master who rules over him (cf. Isa 14:4, 12), to partake of his food and wine prematurely would, sacramentally speaking, be akin to taking from the tree of knowledge and putting themselves under Satan, just as Adam did. Thus they refuse the kingly food, and insist upon an Adamic, creational diet. They know they must first prove themselves priests, before they will be raised to the position of kings; and only God has the authority to raise them to that position, not the serpent or his lackey. They aren’t going to make the same mistake Adam did.

I trust you see how understanding Daniel’s sacramental logic casts great light back onto God giving Adam and Noah food in Genesis 1 and 9. Scripture is divinely constructed not to give us chronologies of events, nor itineraries of diets, but movements and motifs in the history of redemption—fulfilled in Christ. (What do we drink at the Lord’s supper, seated in the heavenly places, preparing to judge angels?) The fact that Adam is explicitly given only plants to eat as he enters his priestly probationary period (the real 3 Ps); and the fact that Noah is explicitly given animals to eat as he enters into his kingly reign—these are not intended to tell us anything about some ideal universal diet for all time; nor an adjustment or accommodation of it to the fall. They are connected not to prelapsarian and postlapsarian situations, but to priestly and kingly statuses: to probationary and discretionary times. To think that God’s provision of food to Adam and Noah shows that man was never meant to eat meat, then, is as muddle-headed as thinking it shows he was never meant to drink wine, or eat from the tree of knowledge—and for the same reasons. In fact, the historical-theological arc of these events, viewed in the backcast light of later scriptures, reveals quite the opposite: in due time, man would have been given all things, and all things would have been made clean—only without sin.

To be continued in part 3, on the wildness of Genesis 1–2…